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Can you make your way to the next Game of Thrones? Jeff Bezos — the second richest man in the world and, incidentally, the owner of the Washington Post — seems to have tried.
According to news reports, the Amazon founder and JRR Tolkien fan had his company invest an estimated $250 million just for the rights to a TV show based on The Lord of the Rings. The resulting series, which debuts Thursday, will be its most expensive ever.
But you already know what I’m doing: if money was everything to create the next fantasy monoculture phenomenon, it would have happened by now.
Amazon Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power arrives 21 years after the first film in Peter Jackson’s cinema trilogy – and less than two weeks after HBO’s own attempt to milk the goodwill of the Game of Thrones prequel- House of the Dragon series. While the Westeros drama highlights its parent series’ penchant for shock, pulp and gore, Middle-earth Saga, consistent with Jackson’s adaptations, is far more family-friendly. Though the eight-part debut season foreshadows an imminent war between Elves and Orcs – involving Dwarves, Men and a precursor to the Hobbit race called Harfoots – the extensive and choppy action in the first two episodes (which were screened for critics) is gory and computer effects controlled. Its defining influence isn’t Game of Thrones’ epic grandeur, but Marvel’s neutrality. If the production design weren’t so spectacular (and the Amazon-bought characters and locations), The Power Rings wouldn’t be so out of place on Disney Plus.
House of the Dragon is Game of Thrones with more wigs, less grandeur
To be fair, the Lord of the Rings franchise was meant for all ages. But it’s not clear who “The Rings of Power” is intended for. Mainly based on the attachments – the attachments! – based on the novel “The Lord of the Rings”, it takes place about 3,000 years before the events of this book. Inexperienced showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay, who only have uncredited writing of “Star Trek Beyond” to their credit on IMDb, have already been greenlit for five seasons (with a possible spin-off in the works) and said, their goal is to make “a 50-hour show” out of material covered in just a few minutes in Jackson’s films. The total budget for the series is estimated at over $1 billion. That should be pretty easy to top: The first season alone cost $465 million, according to the Hollywood Reporter, and that’s not counting the initial money to secure the intellectual property.
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I’ve spent this review so far focusing more on the development of The Rings of Power than its content because there is so little of note in the actual show. The characters – including Elves Galadriel and Elrond, played by Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving in the films – are razor-thin and the plots don’t offer much more substance. Banished from her childhood home of Valinor by a centuries-long war that claimed her older brother, this younger Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) will not give up the fight despite not having seen orcs in years. (Out of combat, elves tend to live forever.)
There’s also a boisterous young Harfoot-seeker named Nori (Markella Kavenagh) – an anomaly in her island nomadic community – so archetypically her refrain might as well be, “I want to be where the people are, it has to be more than this provincial life.” give !” Her wish is soon granted when a sick stranger (Daniel Weyman) – large and square-faced – is found nearby exhausted, amnesiac and heavily implied to be the story’s antagonist.
Many miles away, a human healer, Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), and an elven guardian, Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova), entertain a likely doomed cross-species flirtation. Elrond (Robert Aramayo), a member of the Elf King’s court, faces his own challenges maintaining a friendship with the dwarf prince Durin (Owain Arthur), who may prove to be a crucial ally in the battle against the orcs. Despite Jackson’s claims that the Rings of Power creative team ghosted him, they borrow from and build on the character designs, fairytale aesthetic, and musical landscape he created for the films. (Expect vocals — lots of it.)
The Rings of Power seems set to delight Tolkien fans with breathtaking vistas of exotic lands they may not have seen before: Middle-earth, of course, but also Valinor, a sacred land inhabited by the immortals, and the island kingdom of Númenor, whose downfall is written in the books. (Like Jackson’s films, the series was filmed in New Zealand.) But for audiences not already invested in the comings and goings of the pointy-eared crowd, the series offers little to worry about.
The performances are serviceable but unremarkable, while the dialogue is particularly cheesy and artless, with too many intoned monologues about the quest for “the light” or the ever-vague nature of evil. The fate of many worlds is at stake, but the uninspired opulence on screen ignites only visions in the imagination of bills going up in smoke. Rarely has danger felt so boring.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power debuts two episodes Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on Amazon Prime Video. New episodes are streamed weekly on Fridays.